Social Media Marketing – RankSense – Reclaiming SEO Revenue for Retailershttps://www.ranksense.com
RANKSENSE Can Automatically Detect and Fix Indexing Issues On Any E-Commerce PlatformMon, 18 Sep 2017 20:31:42 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2https://www.ranksense.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/cropped-favicon-32x32.pngSocial Media Marketing – RankSense – Reclaiming SEO Revenue for Retailershttps://www.ranksense.com
3232An Active Mindset: 100 new RSS subscribers and the power of endorsementshttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/an-active-mindset-100-new-rss-subscribers-and-the-power-of-endorsements/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/an-active-mindset-100-new-rss-subscribers-and-the-power-of-endorsements/#commentsTue, 20 Nov 2007 21:19:10 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/11/20/an-active-mindset-100-new-rss-subscribers-and-the-power-of-endorsements/Everybody in the search marketing industry has fallen head over heels for social media. Certainly it’s nice to see those traffic spikes in your website stats. Personally, I see social media as excellent for viral marketing, branding and long-term relationship building. But I don’t see that new visitors coming to a site from social media […]

]]>Everybody in the search marketing industry has fallen head over heels for social media. Certainly it’s nice to see those traffic spikes in your website stats. Personally, I see social media as excellent for viral marketing, branding and long-term relationship building. But I don’t see that new visitors coming to a site from social media sites are particularity interested in taking action on content. Why? Most of them are not in that particular mindset. For first time visits, search engine and affiliate traffic simply convert better.

Unless your monetization strategy is to sell page views you need to keep hitting the home page of the social media sites on a consistent basis in order to take advantage of them. What works best I find is a balanced approach to building traffic. Let me illustrate this by sharing two recent events that sent notable traffic spikes to this blog, as well as the resulting fallout from that traffic.

The first spike was thanks to power stumbler Andy Beard stumbling my post about PageRank and several of his friends voting the story up. I had 357 RSS subscribers at the time, and the post received 946 views that day (October 30th). The next day I received 134 page views and Feedburner reported 350 RSS subscribers. Thanks to Feedburner’s inherent inaccuracy that doesn’t mean people unsubscribed from my blog, but it does tell me that I received no new subscribers from that amazing increase in traffic.

The second spike was yesterday and was because I had requested a paid review from the popular blog John Chow dot Com. I received 1,022 page views and had 332 subscribers. Today I am over 480 page views so far and Feedburner reports 427 RSS subscribers—almost 100 new subscribers, a 30% increase! On top of that, I also got additional traffic to my company and my upcoming product site, as well as qualified leads for my private beta program.

Why the big difference in results from similar page views and visits?

The right visitor mindset

When people are stumbling, digging, and doing their social media thing, they are set on doing one particular task: to digg or bury the story; to vote the content up or down; to bookmark or not, and so on. In contrast, when people read reviews or product/service recommendations, they are interested in learning more and potentially buying or trying it out. This is one of the reasons why I love affiliate marketing. The power of affiliate marketing is not just that you can make money without owning a product (as an affiliate marketer), or that you can promote your product with no marketing budget (as an affiliate merchant), the real power is in pre-sales. People trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

In this particular case, Michael Kwan from John Chow dot Com wrote a well-balanced and very positive review of this blog. He included both praise and critiques that I accepted and immediately acted upon. Few people believe in perfection; there is always something that can be improved, and that is why endorsements that mention both positive and negative things have far more impact than ones that say everything is perfect.

When you read the review it sounds like a solid recommendation providing reasons why his readers would want to read my blog, as well as points where he thought the blog could improve upon. In addition to his review, a mutual reader, David Darey, commented on the story, reinforcing why others should pay a visit to this blog. It is natural to think many people reading that review came here with the mindset of becoming an active reader. If you are one of John’s readers, welcome to my blog and feel free to express yourself in the comments.

Quality First

One of the reasons why I waited 6 months to start marketing the blog seriously is because it is easier to market a good product than it is to market a bad (or incomplete) one. If I only had a handful of low quality posts I am sure the review would not have been as positive, and the results would not have been so stellar. Half a year ago, I decided to take time out from my already busy workday to build a quality blog over time; I’d worry about promoting it later. In the end, it has been a test of patience, but also a rewarding experience.

Traffic spikes for everyone

How can you duplicate this?

Focus on building quality content based on your own unique knowledge and experience. I blog mostly about SEO, which is a topic that has been beaten to death, yet I can always find an idea or angle not yet discussed.

Encourage people both to praise and critique your content. We all like to hear applause, but it is the criticism that makes the blog better. Learn to listen and act on good critiques.

Promote your content on bigger blogs to tap into that blog’s audience. You don’t necessarily need to take the lazy approach I took by paying for a review. Alternatively, you can invest a few hours researching and writing an exceptional post and equally exceptional pitch, and send both to your favorite A-list blogger. I chose to pay because for me is easier to find the money than to find the time to do that. Of course I do plan to start guest posting soon. Not every blog I want to target accepts paid reviews!

Have you tried doing this? Tell me about your peaks and valleys in the comments.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/blog/an-active-mindset-100-new-rss-subscribers-and-the-power-of-endorsements/feed/19Three Easy Steps to Test Your Viral Marketing Ideashttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/three-easy-steps-to-test-your-viral-marketing-ideas/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/three-easy-steps-to-test-your-viral-marketing-ideas/#commentsWed, 07 Nov 2007 08:56:32 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/11/07/three-easy-steps-to-test-your-viral-marketing-ideas/Viral marketing may be one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to market a product or service, but achieving success remains more of an art than a science. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of viral marketing is that you can spend a lot of time and money on what seems like […]

]]>Viral marketing may be one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to market a product or service, but achieving success remains more of an art than a science. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of viral marketing is that you can spend a lot of time and money on what seems like a great idea, yet ultimately be faced with disappointing results. I’ve been playing around with a simple framework to put my viral ideas to the test before committing major resources. Call it “viral ideas split testing.” I think you’ll like it…

Step 1: Brainstorm your viral ideas

Try to come up with at least ten simple and original ideas—nothing too complex. If you want to create videos, consider creating black and white sketches or pictures with captions; you can use that later as the basis for your storyboard. If you plan to create tools, consider writing simple JavaScript prototypes first.

And what better place to draw inspiration for successful viral ideas than social media sites? Use the search function in Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or other sites with keywords related to the topic of your campaign to find previously successful submissions.

Another good way is to modify your profile on StumbleUpon and limit it to the topic you want to research. Start stumbling and bookmark the best ideas you find. Remember, the goal is not simply to copy, but to use these as inspiration to come up with ideas that provide similar benefits.

Step 2: Test each idea on StumbleUpon Ads

Create a campaign for each idea on StumbleUpon Ads and select the most appropriate category. You can refine the campaign further by selecting country and other demographics. (Note that a lot of StumbleUpon users don’t fill out their profile completely and this will filter them out.)

You might not want to use your regular StumbleUpon account because you are testing, and may not want your friends or fans to see what you are up to.

StumbleUpon Ads also gives you immediate feedback about your campaigns based on the number of thumbs up and thumbs down. It is interesting to pay attention to the lack of thumbs up or down too. Based on the testing I’ve been doing, a large number of people don’t vote and that needs to be accounted for as well.

It is a good idea to leave the campaign running until you are able to collect feedback so that you can tell what you are doing right or wrong. Pause the campaigns with the lowest success rates. Use the information you gather to improve the content you are trying to push or to think of something completely different.

Step 3: Improve and offer your winning campaign

After tweaking your campaigns, you’ll successfully figure out the winning idea. Dedicate your time, money and resources on improving the content of that one. Pitch the content to one or more power Stumblers and Digg power users and watch your content spread like wildfire!

Do you have a viral marketing strategy? Please share it in the comments.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/blog/three-easy-steps-to-test-your-viral-marketing-ideas/feed/12The Year of the Widgets: OpenSocial and the big potential for search engine marketershttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/the-year-of-the-widgets-opensocial-and-the-big-potential-for-search-engine-marketers/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/the-year-of-the-widgets-opensocial-and-the-big-potential-for-search-engine-marketers/#commentsTue, 06 Nov 2007 01:45:13 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/11/05/the-year-of-the-widgets-opensocial-and-the-big-potential-for-search-engine-marketers/This year is certain to go down as the year of the widgets. Widgets (also called “gadgets”) are simply small applications that provide dynamic or smart content and they are big news for search marketers, even if the programming gibberish involved has made the fact difficult for many non-developers to see. The biggest difference between […]

]]>This year is certain to go down as the year of the widgets. Widgets (also called “gadgets”) are simply small applications that provide dynamic or smart content and they are big news for search marketers, even if the programming gibberish involved has made the fact difficult for many non-developers to see.

The biggest difference between widgets and traditional content is that the content comes ‘alive’ because readers can interact, click and input text to get the information they are interested in. Everybody, including Google’s new OpenSocial initiative, wants to support widgets in one way or another. Google still has some work to do with OpenSocial, but I am certain that it provides the first glimpse into what the next evolution of search marketing is going to be.

From traditional marketing to widgets

Content and promotion have evolved in the last few years, and search marketers have adapted alongside. Our goal as search marketers has always been to drive qualified search engine traffic to our sites or those of our customers. Traditionally, it has been a matter of ensuring the content was targeting the right keywords and removing any obstacle preventing search engine robots from crawling and indexing the content. But most of the work consisted (and still consists) of building links to usually boring content by means of directory submissions, link trades, and link purchases. Today, link building still remains a tedious, time-consuming and boring task.

Thank God we now have Sphinn, StumbleUpon and social media to help us. With the help of social media sites, the focus shifts dramatically to the content. That is, we now need to create remarkable content that appeals, at least initially, to the audience of popular social sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. The community votes for the best content, and if it is attractive enough it becomes popular and receives a large number of visitors—but most importantly, a good number of natural links from authority bloggers or influencers.

Widget media marketing

Widgets are the next evolutionary step in content delivery. Clicking and interacting with content is just cool enough to grab the attention of today’s overstimulated Web surfers. Of course the widget has to be interesting or useful enough to drive users to bookmark the application and add it to their blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or other widget-friendly page.

More importantly—and this is where Google’s OpenSocial announcement comes into play—widgets can be made entirely “social.” Social widgets have access to a user’s friends, activities, music tastes, and so on. A social widget can leverage that information (with permission) to help spread the widget to other like-minded users. Think about it as smart viral content.

Packaging your own dynamic content as widgets or social widgets offer several benefits:

Your content lives in the personalized homepage of your users. This means that users see your content everyday and it also means that you get permanent and incremental page views, clicks and potential sales.

Your content has viral components built in. Most personalized homepages encourage the sharing of the widgets and promote them through directories and popular lists. With social widgets, users’ friends will be exposed to your content as they update their activity log.

Your content is as viral as it can get. Users are encouraged to install the widgets on their blogs and personal web pages.Because social networks provide information about users’ friends, your widget can leverage a goldmine of information to encourage further adoption.

The best part of Google’s announcement is that widgets designed for OpenSocial will run on the majority of social networks. In contrast to Facebook applications, which currently work only on that site, the opportunity will be much larger with OpenSocial as users in many different social networks spread the word—and that word could easily be your marketing message!

Whether Google succeeds with its plan for OpenSocial or if something else replaces it, the first step has already been taken. Major social sites—including Myspace, Hi5, Orkut, and others—have agreed to adopt an (open?) standard to allow developers access to their information-rich audiences. For search marketers, this is a dream come true.

The Future of Search Marketing through Widgets

Just as social media is not a replacement for search marketing, social widgets are not a replacement either. Smart marketers will have a solid strategy that includes a mix of media, depending on which audience is most appropriate for their client or their product. In the same way that a successful social media campaign can help augment search engine rankings with natural links, it can also help give the initial bookmarks a widget needs to become adopted. Once the widget becomes viral and is installed on users’ blogs or web pages, the links will benefit the search engine rankings too.

As search marketers, I think we need to adapt and evolve. One clear disadvantage, at least to non-developers, is that widget marketing requires programming skills. This is going to be a must-have in the coming months, and if you don’t know how to program, consider partnering or hiring a competent JavaScript developer.

But the bottom line remains unchanged: creativity and adaptation are always going to be key factors for succeeding online.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/blog/the-year-of-the-widgets-opensocial-and-the-big-potential-for-search-engine-marketers/feed/9Giving it away – Advanced Link-Building Strategies through Viral Marketinghttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/giving-it-away-advanced-link-building-strategies-through-viral-marketing/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/giving-it-away-advanced-link-building-strategies-through-viral-marketing/#commentsSun, 23 Sep 2007 00:14:43 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/09/22/giving-it-away-%e2%80%93-advanced-link-building-strategies-through-viral-marketing/As the Web keeps growing, search phrases become more competitive, and the demand for links increases, the art of link building becomes far more difficult. It’s that much more difficult if you only know traditional link-building tactics. As we move forward, it’s going to be increasingly important to think outside the box and use our […]

]]>As the Web keeps growing, search phrases become more competitive, and the demand for links increases, the art of link building becomes far more difficult. It’s that much more difficult if you only know traditional link-building tactics. As we move forward, it’s going to be increasingly important to think outside the box and use our creativity to come up with new link-building ideas. Fortunately, as a regular reader of my blog, you won’t have such a problem.

David Hopkins, a loyal reader, asked me last week if I had some advanced link-building strategies up my sleeve. As a matter of fact I do and, as you know by now, when a loyal reader asks I deliver. I have been overwhelmed lately, but luckily Paul sent me an e-mail yesterday unwittingly reminding me about this topic. Here is what he wrote:

Hi Hamlet,
I was reading about mingle2.com on SEOMoz and I was wondering how did Mike [Matt] managed to have so many visitors in such a short period? High position on ‘free dating online’? What do you think?

Regards
Paul

The post he is referring to is the one in which Matt says he is leaving SEOmoz. I had read the post too and found the numbers truly amazing. I also read an interview that provides more background information about Matt’s phenomenal success, but instead of explaining how he did it (Matt explains this in the interview) I think it would be more useful to generalize the concept and provide a solid framework so that you can build off of the idea.

First of all, these link-building techniques are highly advanced and by that I mean that you need web development skills or access to a web developer friend, employee or contractor. The techniques are white hat, though, and there are two main strategies to get site owners to place links back to your site:

Giving away trophies

Giving away useful tools or dynamic content

Badges and Badgers

Most of us are competitive by nature. At work we have employee-of-the-month. In the Olympics we reach for the gold, silver and bronze. In each case it provides a sense of achievement and recognition. For link-building purposes, the best way to take advantage of this innately human trait is to have people prove their worth. ‘Rate’ them and provide them with a bragging badge with a link back to your site with the desired anchor text.

This is precisely the technique Matt used. He created several interesting quizzes, let visitors take them, and provided them with a badge to place on their sites. Very clever! I call it the site owner badge.

You don’t need to test and provide badges exclusively about the ‘site owner.’ You can provide badges for a blog or web site instead. Offer a badge that gives the dollar value of the site, a ‘trustiness’ or privacy value, or a usability value, etc. I call this a site badge. The hacker-safe badge is a good example of this type of link-building technique. Think about anything that the site owner would be really proud of about his or her site.

Another badge you can provide is focused on the site owner’s visitors. Make them happy or proud and the site owner will be happy too. One example is showing the visitor what percentage of users come to the site from his country or city, or how many use the same operating system, browser, or screen resolution—anything. I call this one the visitors’ badge. A small image displaying a visitor’s country flag or an avatar providing a welcome back message are useful additions that a site owner will place prominently on the site. It provides something of value to his or her visitors, and if they are happy they will come back and the site owner will be happy too.

Badges don’t need to be static, as they are in Matt’s case. They can be dynamic too. The information provided can change with time and/or allow for some sort of interaction. A good example of this type of badge is the big blue Sphinn buttons on most SEM/SEO blogs. They not only provide the number of sphinns the post has, but also give you the ability to increase the vote count by clicking on them. You don’t need to set up a social networking site to make use of this technique. You can ‘rate’ a site owner based on his or her answers to a quiz, for example, and provide a badge with the score including a button to let his visitors agree or disagree with the score. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Again, the only difference between static and dynamic badges is the changing information and the possibility for interaction. The same concepts about site, owner and visitor as explained above still apply here.

Giving away widgets

Every site owner has two main concerns when it comes to visitors: attracting more of them and retaining the existing ones. To retain existing visitors and improve the site’s ‘stickiness,’ site owners try to keep the site fresh with useful content. The easiest way to do this is including dynamic features to the site. Unfortunately, most site owners don’t have web development skills, and this is where our technique comes into play. The technique requires more work, but the link benefit is more direct.

Let’s call a widget any type of dynamic element that provides content or some useful service on a web site. The oldest type of widget I can remember is the hit counter and the stats counter. Look at the most popular stats counters on the Web and you will see that they are at least PageRank 8 and get thousands and thousands of links. Creating your own stats counter might not be the best use of your time, though. Let me offer some easier examples:

Metric converters: currencies, time, weight, etc.

Calculators: mortgage, time to get from one place to another, etc.

Games: Flash, AJAX or Java games. The site owner can place the game on the web site for visitors to play as well as a badge to show users’ high scores.

Search boxes: As an example, you could create a Google custom search engine for recipes and provide a widget for other site owners to display it.

I am sure there are many more widgets you can think of, offering them for free with a link back to your site.

Custom Widgets/API

Some site owners want more flexibility with how widgets blend in with their site. One way to do this is to let them change some visual elements via a CSS style sheet. The best way to provide them with the maximum flexibility is to provide an API to your dynamic code and let them render the content in a way that matches naturally with their site.

The most popular and most developer-friendly way to do this is to provide a REST API. Calling a REST API from a script is like a form submission that returns the results via an XML document. You n
ormally use HTTP GET and not HTTP POST, as in regular forms, though.

This technique is particularly useful if you are targeting a developer audience or high-end site owners that want more customization and can afford developers to integrate your custom widget into their site. The tricky part here is that you must have a license or terms of service agreement that says they must not remove the link back from your XML responses. As they are parsing the XML from a script they can easily strip it and you don’t want that, do you?

Viral Marketing

Well, I probably went a little bit too far with the ‘advanced’ aspect of my post, but I can tell you this custom widget via API technique is definitely effective, and has some other advantages that I plan to discuss in more detail in a future post.

Now, let me briefly explain how you can promote your giveaways.

The most obvious way to spread your ideavirus is to leverage social media sites. You can submit your content to Digg, Propeller, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, and so on. If the idea is good and appeals to such audiences, it will spread. Here are some tips to multiply the viral effect:

Right on the page where you provide the badge or tool include a ‘tell a friend’ feature with five spaces to place e-mails and names. They should be motivated enough to tell their friends about your cool giveaway.

Set up Google alerts to pick up on the conversations that results. Be prompt and courteous in your responses. Remember, your goal is to reinforce the value of your giveaway.

If you are giving away useful tools, consider my favorite place for such things: TheFreeSite. It is a giant catalog of all types of freebies. It is also useful to give you ideas of what people like to get for free.

I really hope that you will make good use of this information. If you can think of more examples and ideas, please share them in the comments section. I want to hear some success stories!

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/blog/giving-it-away-advanced-link-building-strategies-through-viral-marketing/feed/23Keepers and Sneezers: Two signals of branding successhttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/keepers-and-sneezers-two-signals-of-branding-success/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/keepers-and-sneezers-two-signals-of-branding-success/#respondFri, 31 Aug 2007 04:51:41 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/08/31/keepers-and-sneezers-two-signals-of-branding-success/The power of branding I talked about defensible traffic in my previous post, but ultimately all your traffic sources can disappear, leaving you only with the visitors that remember your site, the ones that do not need to follow a link or click on a Google Ad. For me, those visitors are an excellent measure […]

I talked about defensible traffic in my previous post, but ultimately all your traffic sources can disappear, leaving you only with the visitors that remember your site, the ones that do not need to follow a link or click on a Google Ad. For me, those visitors are an excellent measure of the true success of my sites. Those visitors represent the strength of my brand.

There are two clear signals that tell me how strong a brand is: direct traffic and brand searches. Direct traffic visitors are visitors that simply type the URL or domain name in their browser. These visitors know the site. Brand search visitors are usually visitors that are not Web-savvy and go everywhere by searching. At least they remember the name of the site, but they don't remember the domain extension.

Both are indications that the site name is on the mind of the visitor. They are keepers: if every other traffic method disappeared, you will still get those visitors.

The social media juggernaut

After experimenting with social media for a while, I’ve found a fundamental difference in the type and quality of traffic you get compared to traffic from highly-targeted search engine marketing campaigns. Visitors coming from search engines are in a completely different mindset. Depending on the type of search (navigational, informational or transactional), they are more likely to take action than users coming from a social media site.

Simply put, search engine traffic is more likely to improve your bottom line in the short and medium term. But is social media traffic useless then?

Quite the contrary. Social media traffic is excellent for branding. Even if users don't do anything on your site, most of them will probably remember it. The more they see the harder it is to forget. Social media is also an excellent carrier for viral marketing campaigns. These sites are frequently visited by sneezers—the ones who spread the ideaviruses.

I have to admit that many times, I just go directly to my search referral or referring sites statistics and I forget to pay close attention to these two groups, the keepers and the sneezers. I hope that this post reminds me to check those traffic sources everyday.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/blog/keepers-and-sneezers-two-signals-of-branding-success/feed/0Grade School Blogger: Seeking attention through controversyhttps://www.ranksense.com/blog/grade-school-blogger-seeking-attention-through-controversy/
https://www.ranksense.com/blog/grade-school-blogger-seeking-attention-through-controversy/#commentsSat, 11 Aug 2007 04:22:50 +0000http://preview.hamletbatista.com/2007/08/11/grade-school-blogger-seeking-attention-through-controversy/For marketers, branding is an easy concept. For me, as a technical guy, it took me a while to get it. The more people aware that you or your product exists, the better the chance that they will buy from you. Simple, right? But how do you get people to notice you in the first […]

]]>For marketers, branding is an easy concept. For me, as a technical guy, it took me a while to get it.

The more people aware that you or your product exists, the better the chance that they will buy from you. Simple, right?

But how do you get people to notice you in the first place? One of the most cost-effective ways is to get people to talk about you naturally. That is what is known as “word of mouth,” or in a broader sense, viral marketing. Link baiting could easily be called viral link-building because the concept is the same: get people to link to you naturally.

Expert marketers are well aware that the best way to get attention is to appeal to others’ emotions. Get others to stand up from their chairs and they will write about you, link to you, and so on. What happens when, instead of appealing to others’ positive emotions, you appeal to their negative ones? Like calling them names, ridiculing them, getting personal. Most of the time you get a lot of attention, but is it worth it?

Let me share a childhood experience that illustrates my point…When I was in high school I used to get a lot of attention for two traits: one positive and one negative. The positive one was that I would get assignments done in far less time (and far more accurately) than most of my classmates. By the time teachers said “pencils down” I was twiddling my thumbs in boredom. Kids not doing so well in school used to come to me for help and I was happy to offer it.

Because I finished my work earlier than most, I needed to find something to do to fill up my days. To kill time, I used to pester others and ended up in a lot of fights. As you may have guessed, this was my negative trait. I remember my parents’ constant visits to the school, all the reprimands, lectures, promises to do better…

The problem with fighting is that you never win. If I threw the last punch, I would walk around worried for days that I'd be ambushed in revenge. I'm glad that I figured out early in life that it was far better to stay out of trouble. On the other hand, I don't regret helping others and gaining the respect of being recognized as a leader.

Why am I bringing this up? Because now that I am blogging I see a trend that I really don't like. Most bloggers love controversy. I must say that I am also guilty of this. Reading bloggers argue about something and not backing it up definitely peaks my interest and gets me involved. It’s human nature.

But by igniting controversy, purposely or not, we're branding ourselves negatively. We definitely get a lot of attention, like I used to get from my adolescent fights, but we're not necessarily getting the type of attention we seek or need. I know it nice to see our traffic graphs jump, but how many of those visitors will look at that incident and say: “Wow, this is a really bright guy, I want to be like him!”? Most are just chanting, “Fight, fight, fight…”

We are forgetting that each brand has a message associated with it. Do we want to associate a positive message with our brand or do we want to associate a negative one? I am not sure about you, but the message I want to associate with my brand—my name—is only one: “I'm an advanced search marketer.”